


Screw My Roommate

by Articianne



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: ????? i love roommate aus, F/M, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension, age differences and galore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 08:11:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6044461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Articianne/pseuds/Articianne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey needs a place to stay after transferring from shitty Jakku College. The only place open is an off-campus apartment, but turns out her new roommate goes to the rival university as a grad student--he's a First Order Knight, and she, an R.U. Rebel, can't really stand him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Screw My Roommate

**Author's Note:**

> so this first chapter's a little short but they'll be longer. i'm a sucker for roommate aus and i didn't really see one yet (if you know of one, please lemme know) and i hope you guys are open for this ride, featuring: 
> 
> 1\. undergrad/grad  
> 2\. age differences  
> 3\. crazy UST later on  
> 4\. kylo ren actually being really fucking clean  
> 5\. rey makes a mess of the apartment for the hell of it  
> 6\. apparently kylo has grease stain kinks  
> 7\. hell yeah

“You’ve got to be _joking._ ”  A long-fingered hand smoothed back fly away hairs that had escaped from her bun before it dropped to the counter and tapped away on the hard surface. Rey pressed the cell phone closer to her ear. “That’s it? That’s the last one? Who’s the occupant?”

A name rattled off the bored owner’s tongue on the other side of the line. Actually, Rey couldn’t understand the name that well at all.

“I have no idea who that is,” said Rey weakly. “Well, okay. How much is the other room for?”

Another number. Rey’s chest loosened a little; she could afford that, it wasn’t too bad. But still, she’d been hoping for a studio or something where she _didn’t_ have to have to deal with a roommate. But the owner told her the roommate wouldn’t be too bad. They were supposedly a grad student, immersed in research twenty-four seven, so it _would_ be like Rey had the place to herself. . . .

“I guess we can do that,” said Rey finally. “You said the photos are online, right? It’s not like I have another choice, there aren’t any places on campus I can get, and this is the only fully furnished spot off-campus that won’t cost me a fortune. . . . Oh, thanks.”

With another word of thanks, Rey hung up and leaned heavily on the counter of her friend’s kitchen. “How’d it go?” came Poe’s voice from the living room. The sound of the TV filtered in afterward.

She pushed away from the counter with her forearms and walked to the living room, where he was sitting oddly and watching the TV screen upside down on the couch; his back was on the seat of the cushion and his legs were propped up against the back of the couch itself, so his feet were up in the air for Rey to grab and tickle. She grinned and gave a little flick on the bottom of one of his feet. Poe yelped, his head snapping up from the bottom of the couch before he grimaced and kicked at her half-heartedly. “Don’t do that!”

“It went well,” she told him, moving around the couch and sitting beside him. “I got a place. It’s a two bedroom, so I have a roommate.”

“Thought you didn’t want a roommate,” said Poe, dropping his head back down against the bottom of the couch. His face was turning red.

“Yeah, but this was the last place that wouldn’t cost me all my savings,” said Rey, making a face. She flicked at Poe’s stomach. “Sit up! You look like a tomato.”

Poe waggled his eyebrows at her. “Finn likes tomatoes. Anyway, who’s the roommate?”

“Some grad student, so it won’t be too bad.”

“Any name?”

“Yeah, er . . . Riley or Karen or Lauren. . . . It was kind of hard to catch.”

“Didn’t know they let undergrads and grads room together,” pondered Poe, finally sitting up and wincing. He held his head and looked around dazedly as he righted himself on the couch.

Rey shrugged. She’d been wondering that, too, but since it was off-campus, she figured it didn’t matter. “It’s not like it’s a dorm or a student apartment. It’s just a place in the city. Thanks for letting me hang here with you and Finn, by the way. There’s no way I could’ve found a place right after I transferred from Jakku.”

Jakku College had been a small, dingy college she’d gone to after finally getting out of the foster program in Jakku itself. After having gotten good enough grades, she’d nailed a research opportunity and a transfer acceptance to R.U.—Resistance Uni, where she didn’t have to pay for her tuition or books. If she’d dormed on campus, she wouldn’t have had to pay for that, either, but she hated dorms and the people in them from her own experience—plus, by the time she’d arrived, there hadn’t been any dorms left.

“That _is_ true,” Poe agreed. He yawned widely before reaching behind Rey’s head and pulling her bun apart. “Gotta let down your hair every once in a while, Rey, else you’ll start seeing some bald spots.”

“Look who’s talking, Mr. Greying-at-Thirty.”

“Thirty-two,” said Poe sourly.

“Still nothing to brag about.” Rey rolled her eyes at him, smiling, before she stood up again. “Come help me pack. Then when Finn gets home from practice, we can have a nice dinner before I leave tomorrow morning.”

Poe got up, muttering something about “demanding”; they moved to her room, which she technically shared with Finn, except Finn mysteriously vanished to Poe’s room every night while she’d been there. Poe opened the closet and withdrew a couple trash bags of her clothes and threw them on the bed.

“Finn would kill you if he saw what you’re doing right now,” said Rey, reclining against the edge of the bed and watching Poe leave a mess in Finn’s closet.

“Whatever. I’ll make him forget about it.” Poe kicked a box out and plopped on the floor. “Alright, woman. Get your shit together.”

“Help me get my bras and all that. Actually, do me a favor and grab my pads.” Poe made a face at her, his lips downturned, looking so offended she had to laugh. “Grey hairs, check! Wrinkles, double check!”

By the time Finn arrived, Rey’s stuff had been miraculously stuffed into one large case of luggage. It looked awful, but it was closed, and Rey was pretty damn grateful for it. She could be out of Finn and Poe’s hair by the next morning, off to her new place before the term started.

“Wow, Rey!” said Finn when he saw how clean his room had become. “It’s like you were never here.”

“Thank God,” muttered Poe, making another face at her. Rey chucked a tampon at him.

Finn tapped her luggage with his hand, watching her carefully. “And if I open this, it’ll look _nice,_ right?”

“Of course,” said Rey as she watched Poe murder a smile behind Finn. “But you probably shouldn’t. It took us twenty minutes to get the top zipped up.”

Finn opened his mouth, alarmed, but before he could say anything the buzzer rang; Poe darted out of the room, and a moment later, he called, “Pizza’s here!”

“Pizza,” said Finn weakly, apparently forgetting all about Rey’s luggage. “He ordered pizza. Why do I ever let him make decisions?” Rey knew that Finn was used to always eating the healthiest foods (or, well, the barest), and she decided to hold her tongue about it. Instead, when Rey told him that he normally took too long to make up his mind about something—like what toppings he wanted or whether they should get pizza at all—Finn scoffed at her and led her to the foyer, where Poe was just handing the delivery boy his tip before shutting the door in his face. “Hawaiian,” he announced. Finn made a small noise of protest before opening the box in Poe’s arms and pulling a slice out; it was decorated with melted cheese and pineapples, the latter which Rey found a little too sweet on pizza, so she pulled out her own slice and, one by one, rid herself of the pineapple.

Poe called her a traitor before proceeding to eat the left-over pineapple pieces. Finn didn’t seem to mind anymore.

 

* * *

 

The next morning was, surprisingly, going very well; she had all of her belongings pressed into her case, though it looked about to burst, and she had gotten the key to her place in the mail. Finn promised to drop her off as Poe went to teach his ROTC section. As they clambered into Finn’s pristinely kept car—with Rey taking extra care not to leave any stains on the seats as she slurped noisily on her coffee—Finn asked, “So, who exactly’s your roommate?”

“Some grad student,” said Rey, reclining her head on the headrest and squinting at the morning sun.

“They’re at R.U.?”

Resistance Uni. Rey thought about it a little while. The more she thought about it, the more she realized she didn’t exactly have an answer. “Uh, I don’t know,” she said, sheepishly sneaking a glance at Finn. It would've done her good to look up her roommate for a bit, but she'd barely caught the name over the phone in the first place. She'd been too caught up with trying to get a place to stay that other details had completely flown over her head.

Finn groaned. “Really, Rey! They could be dangerous. How do you just walk around blindly trusting everyone you—”

“Look who’s talking! You and Poe met because Poe trusted _you_ to leave that First Order gang.”

“My point exactly,” Finn said, pointing at her while keeping his eyes on the road. “Where do I turn?”

Several minutes later, they were parked in front of a tall apartment building that—to Rey’s utter surprise—even had a doorman. It seemed to rise endlessly into the grey sky and she swallowed as Finn whistled to himself. “You got a place _here?”_

“It didn’t seem to look that big from the photos,” she said breathlessly. “Are we at the right place? This _is_ the Finalizer, right?”

“Sure is,” said Finn.

“Maybe the owner made a mistake in the price,” said Rey, opening the door and climbing out of the car.

As Finn helped her pull out her belongings, he pointed out that maybe the rent was so low because her roommate could be covering most of it. Rey didn’t fight the idea, but Finn continued about the building itself. The Finalizer was a typical high-end building for many of the powerful people in the city who worked with the other university in the city, one that Rey didn't want to think about. Nonetheless, this was practically her only option if she wanted a quiet term. As she approached the doorman, he bowed low and welcomed her into the lobby.

“You think you’ve got everything?” said Finn as Rey gaped at the high ceilings and the dark colors around the lobby.

She gave a helpless laugh. “I guess. I’ll see you later, Finn. Maybe if my roommate’s okay with it, you and Poe can come over sometime.”

“Give me a call as soon as you meet them,” said Finn. “See you, Rey!”

As she walked up to the desk clerk and heard the lobby door swing shut by the doorman, she picked up her key and made her way to the elevator. Ten floors and several steps later, she was staring at her new apartment door; quickly shoving the key into the lock, she twisted and opened the door.

What greeted her was the most well-kept apartment she’d ever seen in her life.

“Oh, boy,” she muttered to herself, shutting the door and staring at the expanse in front of her. The photos _didn’t_ lie—it was rather small, but it was beautiful and completely devoid of any mess. She was going to have a tough time staying here if it looked this clean all the time. In fact, she was pretty sure no person could be this clean. Even Finn, with all his military precision and organizational skills, was nowhere near this meticulous about his belongings. . . .

“Hello?” she said, louder this time, pulling her luggage into the room. No one replied. _Does anyone even live here? Did I get the wrong key?_ she wondered briefly, but then she saw a pair of boots—spotless, of course—sitting at the entrance to the foyer. Then, as she focused, she heard the sound of the shower water running.

Rey hurriedly pulled her luggage into the living room and padded to the black couch, trying not to touch anything. Would this be her life for the next term? Avoiding finger stains? Unable to have a snack on the couch? Not leaving grease-stains from her engineering projects on the desk in her room?

It seemed like forever until the sounds from the shower stopped, but when they did, Rey sat up as straight as she could. Three minutes later was the sound of the bathroom door opening. Footsteps, a sniff—then, “Who the fuck are you?”

She _was_ going to answer with, “No one—er, I mean, I’m Rey, your new roommate,” but she was too wrapped up in the fact that her roommate was a very tall, very intimidating, very male person. _Male,_ it seemed, was the most important thing here. In fact, it hadn’t necessarily occurred to Rey that the “grad student” could be male. Especially since she’d imagined a Riley . . . no, a Karen. A Lauren. No, inwardly she’d been imagining a woman who was probably just a teacher’s assistant in her free time, working on a medical thesis or something of the like. She was _not_ prepared to see man with a towel draped over his head and a black robe wrapped around his torso in an apartment as clean as this one.

Everything about him was dark and large. Ears that protruded from the sides of his head covered by his long black hair, vaguely reminding Rey to ask him what conditioner he used; long nose that somehow fit his long face; lips that were downturned into a look of irritation; huge hands holding the towel to his head as he stared at her; limbs that seemed to go on forever, making her wonder if his parents were exceedingly tall or just got lucky.

“I repeat,” he said, pulling the towel off his head slowly, “who the fuck are you?”

“Rey.” She leapt up from the couch. “Er, your new roommate. I just—erm—got here. Ten minutes ago. Twenty?”

His eyes bore into hers as he towered over her, as though making sure she passed some sort of inspection. Finally, he said, “Don’t make a mess, don’t go into my room, don’t ask me too many questions, and don’t throw parties. Got it?” Then, as her brows drew into a frown, he added, “I don’t like dealing with undergrads, so if you stay out of my way, we won’t have to worry about anything.”

“Well, you’re just a bundle of joy, aren’t you,” Rey muttered, plopping back down on the couch. Her eyes trailed him—she didn’t even know his fucking name yet, _Karen_ —as he walked into the kitchen, pulled something from the fridge, and walked back out with a chilled water bottle. Then, without so much as a word, he disappeared back into his room.

Rey frowned and pulled out her phone. Surely she could find out which grad students were doing what on R.U.’s site. But, even half an hour later, she’d come up with nothing. So when her roommate emerged again from his room simply to deposit his empty bottle into the recycling, she demanded, “What’s your name?”

“Kylo Ren,” he answered shortly.

Rey withheld a wince. No wonder she’d gotten it wrong. It sounded a lot like Karen or Lauren over the phone. “And what degree do you have?”

“I thought I told you not to ask too many questions.”

“I think I deserve to know who I’m living with for the next term,” she told him, standing from the couch and leveling him with a hard look. “I’m a mechanical engineer and comp-sci major. What about you?”

He _tch_ ed and turned around, beginning to pull clean dishes out of the dishwasher and putting them back in their cabinets. “I’m doing research in neuroscience and psych that really isn’t any of your business.”

 _Wow, what a jerk,_ thought Rey. Her brows rose into her hairline. “Neuro and psych, huh? I didn’t think R.U. had big grad programs for those.”

Suddenly, he straightened from the dishwasher and landed her with such a glare that she almost lost her footing; he leaned forward, large nose wrinkling, and said, “So you’re a _Rebel,_ huh?”

“Wh-what?”

“You’re a Resistance Rebel,” he sneered, before leaning away and casting her the evilest look in existence. “Maybe I should just kick you out.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” she demanded, already at her wit’s end with the man in front of her.

Kylo Ren—Kylo, whatever—looked repulsed and turned back to putting the dishes away. “You’re very new,” he said. “No wonder you’re so ignorant of everything.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t be ‘ignorant’ if you explained yourself. Honestly, are manners beneath you?”

“Fine. Sit down,” he said shortly. Rey sat on the floor, ignoring his orders to sit at the kitchen bar like a civilized person. When she didn’t bother moving, he shut the dishwasher and leaned one elbow against the counter, looking down at her on the floor.

“You’ve got two competing research universities here in the city,” he said. “R.U., your precious Resistance Uni, and The University of the First Order, or U.F.O., both of which get funding from different governmental organizations around the country.”

Rey had to kill a smile at _U.F.O.—_ Poe would have a field day knowing her roommate was from there. “So what?”

“ _So,_ you have two universities in the same city that fight for everything,” he said. “ _You_ all at R.U. are called the Rebels. In case you didn’t know, that’s your mascot. Then you have the First Order Knights.”

“You’ve got a little bit of a superiority complex at the First Order, then.”

“It might do you good to be quiet,” he said before pulling out a glass and a bottle from the nearby wine cabinet. “By the looks of it, since you’re rooming _here,_ you’ve gotten a scholarship from R.U. from a small college no one cares about and you’re new to the city. You don’t really know anyone except the contacts who introduced you to R.U. in the first place, and you’re not really a people-person, judging from the fact that you’re not dorming or getting a student apartment on campus. You don’t have much money to you aside from what you’ve earned, otherwise you’d probably have gotten a loan from your family to have a studio all to yourself so you could do things your own way. But you don’t have a family, or you just don’t talk to them, so you’ve done everything yourself and you’re trying to make it in the city at the big, new university you’re attending.”

He stopped talking, letting his words soak for a bit in the air between them. Finally he turned his head around and saw her sitting, brows heavily drawn and mouth slightly opened at him. As if offended, almost.

“So I was right.” He looked smug before he turned back to pouring his wine in a glass.

“How did you know all that?” Rey demanded, scrambling to her feet. “That was incredible. No wonder you’re into neuroscience and psych, I could _never_ read anybody as well as you just did!”

He didn’t reply. He only took his glass of wine, swished it, and walked away from her. “I’ve got to get ready to leave. Don’t touch the alcohol unless you’re a neat drunk, or you’ll be paying out of pocket.”

“I already pay for rent—”

“No, you don’t, it’s covered by my research grants.” And the door shut closed.

Rey leaned against the counter, glowering at the door to his room, and thought heavily about how much her new dick of a roommate could stand to lose the stick rammed up his behind.


End file.
